.comment: Road Building

Compiling on the Fly

May 30, 2001

You may be among those tormented by
the question: Which takes longer, compiling the KDE-2.2 beta on a
Pentium 166 with 104 megs of memory or driving from Western
Connecticut to Key West, Florida, on a busy holiday weekend?

If you are, your anguish is soon to be
relieved. I've tried, over time, to resolve the burning issues that
don't quite make it to the FAQ lists because it would involve too
much work to provide an accurate answer. It was me, for instance, who
proved that it is possible to run Microsoft Bob in a VMware virtual
machine. This is not the kind of information you can get anywhere
else. It is a valuable service, understanding that value is a
continuum that begins immediately above zero.

Motivated to add primary research to
the world's store of knowledge and thereby uplift all persons, last
week I hopped into the rental car, fired up the motor, typed
"./configure", and headed down the road.

Actually, I needed to drive to Florida
for family events and I also needed to compile the KDE-2.2 beta so as
to look it over. So I got a little Tripplite inverter to plug into
the cigarette lighter, plugged my Thinkpad's power supply into the
inverter, and plugged the Thinkpad into its power supply. Admittedly,
the juice from a cigarette lighter isn't the cleanest stuff in the
world, but I figured that there were sufficient protections in the
heat-generating boxes between the lighter and the computer to arrive
at useful volts, and I was right. I ended up with my little computer
sitting on the passenger seat, screen and keyboard facing me.

Also facing me was 1,600 miles of
Interstate highway and, at the end, some winding and dangerous
two-lane stuff -- U.S. 1 from the end of I-95 to the end of the U.S.

Compiling KDE involves building 12
packages. The first is kdesupport, which I understand is due to be
deprecated, but if it comes with the CVS harvest I build it, and this
time it did so I did. It doesn't take long -- it was done by the time
I hit the I-84 construction delay at 5:05 a.m., 15 miles from my
house. This gave me time to change directories and start the build of
kdelibs, the second package to compile when you're growing KDE from
seed. And it proved that the command buffer in bash is more than a
convenience. Building each of the packages involves these commands:

ln -s ../kde-common/admin ./

make -f Makefile.cvs

./configure --prefix=/opt/kde

make

make install

cd ./kde[next package]

With the scrollable buffer, only the
directory change requires and real attention; for everything else,
it's simply six taps of the up arrow and hitting the enter key. This
is a considerable advantage when doing important research while also
trying to avoid wrecking the car, in that several of the commands
take a little time to complete. I was able to get by just fine, eyes
on the road and hand firmly on the wheel, except when changing
directories, for which I determined I would stop. It turned out to be
no problem, because it didn't come up all that often.